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Now the Principle this stated, all good and beauty, and
everlasting, is centred in The One, sprung from It, and pointed
towards It, never straying from It, but ever holding about It and
in It and living by Its law; and it is in this reference, as I
judge, that Plato- finely, and by no means inadvertently but with
profound intention- wrote those words of his, "Eternity stable in
Unity"; he wishes to convey that Eternity is not merely something
circling on its traces into a final unity but has [instantaneous]
Being about The One as the unchanging Life of the Authentic
Existent. This is certainly what we have been seeking: this
Principle, at rest within rest with the One, is Eternity;
possessing this stable quality, being itself at once the absolute
self-identical and none the less the active manifestation of an
unchanging Life set towards the Divine and dwelling within It,
untrue, therefore, neither on the side of Being nor on the side
of Life- this will be Eternity [the Real-Being we have sought].
Truly to be comports never lacking existence and never knowing
variety in the mode of existence: Being is, therefore,
self-identical throughout, and, therefore, again is one
undistinguishable thing. Being can have no this and that; it
cannot be treated in terms of intervals, unfoldings, progression,
extension; there is no grasping any first or last in it.
If, then, there is no first or last in this Principle, if
existence is its most authentic possession and its very self, and
this in the sense that its existence is Essence or Life- then,
once again, we meet here what we have been discussing, Eternity.
Observe that such words as "always," "never," "sometimes" must be
taken as mere conveniences of exposition: thus "always- used in
the sense not of time but of incorruptibility and endlessly
complete scope- might set up the false notion of stage and
interval. We might perhaps prefer to speak of "Being," without
any attribute; but since this term is applicable to Essence and
some writers have used the word "Essence" for things of process,
we cannot convey our meaning to them without introducing some
word carrying the notion of perdurance.
There is, of course, no difference between Being and Everlasting
Being; just as there is none between a philosopher and a true
philosopher: the attribute "true" came into use because there
arose what masqueraded as philosophy; and for similar reasons
"everlasting" was adjoined to "Being," and "Being" to
"everlasting," and we have [the tautology of] "Everlasting
Being." We must take this "Everlasting" as expressing no more
than Authentic Being: it is merely a partial expression of a
potency which ignores all interval or term and can look forward
to nothing by way of addition to the All which it possesses. The
Principle of which this is the statement will be the
All-Existent, and, as being all, can have no failing or
deficiency, cannot be at some one point complete and at some
other lacking.
Things and Beings in the Time order- even when to all appearance
complete, as a body is when fit to harbour a soul- are still
bound to sequence; they are deficient to the extent of that
thing, Time, which they need: let them have it, present to them
and running side by side with them, and they are by that very
fact incomplete; completeness is attributed to them only by an
accident of language.
But the conception of Eternity demands something which is in its
nature complete without sequence; it is not satisfied by
something measured out to any remoter time or even by something
limitless, but, in its limitless reach, still having the
progression of futurity: it requires something immediately
possessed of the due fullness of Being, something whose Being
does not depend upon any quantity [such as instalments of time]
but subsists before all quantity.
Itself having no quantity, it can have no contact with anything
quantitative since its Life cannot be made a thing of fragments,
in contradiction to the partlessness which is its character; it
must be without parts in the Life as in the essence.
The phrase "He was good" [used by Plato of the Demiurge] refers
to the Idea of the All; and its very indefiniteness signifies the
utter absense of relation to Time: so that even this Universe has
had no temporal beginning; and if we speak of something "before"
it, that is only in the sense of the Cause from which it takes
its Eternal Existence. Plato used the word merely for the
convenience of exposition, and immediately corrects it as
inappropriate to the order vested with the Eternity he conceives
and affirms.
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